The current beta is open to everyone using the Early Access version, although it has certain limits still. There is no Mac Or Linux version yet (although those will be along soon), and paid content is only available for viewing, but nor for downloading. The purchase system will be opened up when the Player comes out of beta.

Ye, I only noticed this when trying to sign up for a Player account and my email being taken. Would be nice to have some clarification that it is the same account across the Marketplace and Player as it does ask you to sign in with your Player account rather than a more generic YoYoGames Account.

Once you have registered and activated your account, you can use the player to download and play games without the need for any further action. However, if you plan on purchasing games, or if you are a developer wanting to publish or sell your games, then you will have to fill in some additional information on the YoYo Games site.

Concerning the above information. I would ideally like to keep my developer side separated from my player side. I'm concerned that if I ever felt the need to give a game a low rating after playing it, the developer might out of spite rate my games down. Will this be possible?

Secondly, about 1% of the games I play uses the Escape key, this really is not as popular and widespread as you imagine it. I personally never use it. None of my games have escape functionality - they all do have proper menus with buttons for pause, restart, quit, options etc. I hope this will not become a hard and fast rule but remain a suggestion.

Ye, I only noticed this when trying to sign up for a Player account and my email being taken. Would be nice to have some clarification that it is the same account across the Marketplace and Player as it does ask you to sign in with your Player account rather than a more generic YoYoGames Account.

Once you have registered and activated your account, you can use the player to download and play games without the need for any further action. However, if you plan on purchasing games, or if you are a developer wanting to publish or sell your games, then you will have to fill in some additional information on the YoYo Games site.

Concerning the above information. I would ideally like to keep my developer side separated from my player side. I'm concerned that if I ever felt the need to give a game a low rating after playing it, the developer might out of spite rate my games down. Will this be possible?

Secondly, about 1% of the games I play uses the Escape key, this really is not as popular and widespread as you imagine it. I personally I never use it. None of my games have escape functionality - they all do have proper menus with buttons for, pause, restart, quit, options etc. I hope this will not become a hard and fast rule but remain a suggestion.

Like the marketplace, the publisher can be any name you choose and is linked to the main user account, which isn't visible. So you can publish games with any name you wish... As for the use of the escape key, like any new platform you should adapt to the norms for that platform and while YYG won't pull your game for not using it, it IS recommended practice so that hopefully all users can have the same general experience and use the same general conventions for all games. I would recommend taking a few moments to follow the guidelines and make your game conform to them as much as possible... failure to do so could result in poorer ratings, especially if everyone else does it.

- Doesn't properly obey alt-tab order probably since its full screen / some custom window nonsense causing it to be ignored by alt tab.

- My developer login doesn't work so now I have like 10 accounts across various YoYo things.

- You stuff the games into /AppData. In this day and age when people have small SSDs with the operating system on them

you can't just go throwing stuff on that drive without consideration for the end user. Add the ability to put games on another drive.

- The installer is weird.

Besides that it seems passable. I'm a bit worried about it being another hasty "me too" item. We have Steam, Origin, UPlay, and people already complain about having to install something other than Steam. Seems like this will be super niche and no much more?

- Doesn't properly obey alt-tab order probably since its full screen / some custom window nonsense causing it to be ignored by alt tab.

- My developer login doesn't work so now I have like 10 accounts across various YoYo things.

- You stuff the games into /AppData. In this day and age when people have small SSDs with the operating system on them

you can't just go throwing stuff on that drive without consideration for the end user. Add the ability to put games on another drive.

- The installer is weird.

Besides that it seems passable. I'm a bit worried about it being another hasty "me too" item. We have Steam, Origin, UPlay, and people already complain about having to install something other than Steam. Seems like this will be super niche and no much more?

Well it's in beta, what do you expect? You're the lab rat buddy
Its super niche.... because its just for GameMaker! It serves its purpose and hopefully it will do well serving its purpose of being a medium to distribute GameMaker games.

The appdata struggle is real. My glorious SSD has barely any free space so I can't go installing games to it without fear of imminent system failure.

'username' is odd, as the marketplace logins don't even use usernames but email addressed. Lack of both the ability to paste password or see the password without asterisks is a killer for people with more secure passwords that are a pain to type out (20 characters of random letters and numbers of differing cases were never meant to be typed manually).

And this really doesn't need to be fullscreen by default. Steam big picture mode is only really of use to people with their PC hooked up to a TV, which is the vast minority of players. Likewise for this. This kind of UI just ends up being clunkier for mouse and keyboard operation. Especially since very custom UI means you lose all of Windows' accessibility features like tabbing between fields, Shortcut Characters, screen-reader compatibility, etc. That also stands to make actually paying for games a pain too, if I can't paste in certain information or look for it on my computer (it isn't sensible to assume all end-users know how to work Alt-Tab).

Get a 'show password' checkbox, Copy & Pasting for the fields, and start it in a sensibly sized window and you'll have yourselves a good start.

I am hoping some kind of Web version will be made. I mean, every other service like this I have used has one, even lesser known ones.

In other news, I am using Nocturne's various helpdesk articles to get the next Alpha of Homestead Player ready.

I have a bit of a question. Since you will be adding payments in the future, are Donations going to be part of that? I like to make my games free, but I usually always have a PayPal button somewhere on my site for the game.

I have a bit of a question. Since you will be adding payments in the future, are Donations going to be part of that? I like to make my games free, but I usually always have a PayPal button somewhere on my site for the game.

I'm pretty sure that donations won't be a part of the Player. The same has been suggested for the Marketplace, and been rejected, so I would assume the Player will follow the same pattern.... legal issues, etc...

I have a bit of a question. Since you will be adding payments in the future, are Donations going to be part of that? I like to make my games free, but I usually always have a PayPal button somewhere on my site for the game.

I'm pretty sure that donations won't be a part of the Player. The same has been suggested for the Marketplace, and been rejected, so I would assume the Player will follow the same pattern.... legal issues, etc...

Aww, oh well. Thanks for answering.

I've been thinking of making Homestead a paid game, I am putting a lot of time into it, and the Bazaar Server is not free.

I think limiting the number of games for the FREE version of GM is a good idea to prevent the flood of spam that ruined the old sandbox.

Would like to see unlimited games for people with the Professional or Master collection.

Hope they have something in place that will prevent spammers from making multiple accounts...

A good idea would have been to leave the old sandbox for people who have the FREE version of GM.

The new site could have been dedicated for people with the Professional and Master versions.

Another thing that ruined the old Sandbox...People with multiple accounts who gave all the good games 1 star

in an effort to boost their own games (which they gave multiple 5 stars) in the ratings.

​Maybe only people who have GM Professional or Masters should be allowed to rate games?

I'd totally agree.

I don't even know where to start.

- Full screen

- Can't copy and paste in my login name and password.

- Doesn't properly obey alt-tab order probably since its full screen / some custom window nonsense causing it to be ignored by alt tab.

- My developer login doesn't work so now I have like 10 accounts across various YoYo things.

- You stuff the games into /AppData. In this day and age when people have small SSDs with the operating system on them

you can't just go throwing stuff on that drive without consideration for the end user. Add the ability to put games on another drive.

- The installer is weird.

Besides that it seems passable. I'm a bit worried about it being another hasty "me too" item. We have Steam, Origin, UPlay, and people already complain about having to install something other than Steam. Seems like this will be super niche and no much more?

"Doesn't properly obey alt-tab" - Does Win-D / alt-esc still work though? It's what I use to exit out of fullscreen apps usually.

The appdata struggle is real. My glorious SSD has barely any free space so I can't go installing games to it without fear of imminent system failure.

'username' is odd, as the marketplace logins don't even use usernames but email addressed. Lack of both the ability to paste password or see the password without asterisks is a killer for people with more secure passwords that are a pain to type out (20 characters of random letters and numbers of differing cases were never meant to be typed manually).

And this really doesn't need to be fullscreen by default. Steam big picture mode is only really of use to people with their PC hooked up to a TV, which is the vast minority of players. Likewise for this. This kind of UI just ends up being clunkier for mouse and keyboard operation. Especially since very custom UI means you lose all of Windows' accessibility features like tabbing between fields, Shortcut Characters, screen-reader compatibility, etc. That also stands to make actually paying for games a pain too, if I can't paste in certain information or look for it on my computer (it isn't sensible to assume all end-users know how to work Alt-Tab).

Get a 'show password' checkbox, Copy & Pasting for the fields, and start it in a sensibly sized window and you'll have yourselves a good start.

Aaand this is why I never jump on any beta bandwagons.

As for SSDs, GMS games has been using Appdata/Local for ages (due to cross-platform reasons and Microsoft's backwards compatibility incompetence) and since the player only plays GMS games...

There's no particular reason to put the EXEs there, though, really, only the sandbox files. (I'm not sure GMS games are very good with SSDs in general, though, given that those files might get updated quite often even if they're small...).

(20 characters of random letters and numbers of differing cases were never meant to be typed manually).

Correct Horse Battery Staple!Same entropy, easier to type. Shame most systems enforce usage of at least 1 special character, though, but I don't think the Player does.

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- The above is my personal opinion and in no way representative of Yoyogames or the GMC, except when explicitly stated -

I think limiting the number of games for the FREE version of GM is a good idea to prevent the flood of spam that ruined the old sandbox.

Would like to see unlimited games for people with the Professional or Master collection.

Hope they have something in place that will prevent spammers from making multiple accounts...

A good idea would have been to leave the old sandbox for people who have the FREE version of GM.

The new site could have been dedicated for people with the Professional and Master versions.

Another thing that ruined the old Sandbox...People with multiple accounts who gave all the good games 1 star

in an effort to boost their own games (which they gave multiple 5 stars) in the ratings.

​Maybe only people who have GM Professional or Masters should be allowed to rate games?

Me and Sandbox lovers agree but why do admins not agree :'(

Because you and those that agree with you, have limited access to information

You don't have access to account names doing the rating

You don't have access to rating patterns by these accounts

You don't have access to IP addresses used by these accounts

You don't have access to background information associated with these accounts such as email address

The admins have access to all the above information.

So given one group of individuals who have access to all of the above information, and another group of individuals who have none of the extra information, and they draw different conclusions. Which group is likely more correct?

The answer. Not you.

2

If the Bible truly is inspired by God, you would think that somebody as omnipotent and all-knowing would have known to get his message out using TCP instead of UDP.

I think limiting the number of games for the FREE version of GM is a good idea to prevent the flood of spam that ruined the old sandbox.

Would like to see unlimited games for people with the Professional or Master collection.

Hope they have something in place that will prevent spammers from making multiple accounts...

A good idea would have been to leave the old sandbox for people who have the FREE version of GM.

The new site could have been dedicated for people with the Professional and Master versions.

Another thing that ruined the old Sandbox...People with multiple accounts who gave all the good games 1 star

in an effort to boost their own games (which they gave multiple 5 stars) in the ratings.

​Maybe only people who have GM Professional or Masters should be allowed to rate games?

Me and Sandbox lovers agree but why do admins not agree :'(

Because you and those that agree with you, have limited access to information

You don't have access to account names doing the rating

You don't have access to rating patterns by these accounts

You don't have access to IP addresses used by these accounts

You don't have access to background information associated with these accounts such as email address

The admins have access to all the above information.

So given one group of individuals who have access to all of the above information, and another group of individuals who have none of the extra information, and they draw different conclusions. Which group is likely more correct?

The answer. Not you.

Player will be Free? and we not need to download it for downloading games from it?

Just one question I didn't find on the Players FAQ-page:
When your application wants to store or load data into/from the working_directory like screenshots, highscores, user settings for his avatar-character - is then the working_directory on YoYos server or on the users computer at home ? If on YoYos server, are there any limitations for the storage amount ?

Just one question I didn't find on the Players FAQ-page:
When your application wants to store or load data into/from the working_directory like screenshots, highscores, user settings for his avatar-character - is then the working_directory on YoYos server or on the users computer at home ? If on YoYos server, are there any limitations for the storage amount ?

Oh man I'm so keen to publish on the Player I updated my game just for it! Unfortunately there is a bug preventing me from doing so at the moment but help desk said it will be fixed next update which is great news. I guess I'll just have to cram in more content while I wait!

I had a go and downloaded Abbaye des Morts. Which I enjoyed muchly. Very Spectrum-like, only missing the attribute colour-clash glitch/feature of the Speccy. Says the game is from 2010. Never seen it til now. Not sure I like getting email receipts when the game is free though. Sony have started doing that lately (in the past couple months I keep getting a receipt for each PlayStation Plus freebie game. Bit annoying). But not real problems as of yet.

Oh I seen those before but didn't realise it was same guy. I dunno. I find the colour usage in the more 16-bit looking stuff really dry and somewhat bland even though the actual pixel work is nice. I really like the Spectrum feel of Abbaye des Morts for some reason though (I didn't ever even own a Spectrum). It's like the older I get, the less colours I want in my games or something. I've no idea. Maybe it's cos it feels much more 'european' whereas many of the games there look more inspired by japanese companies such as Capcom and Konami. I miss those days.

Aw, I was almost gonna buy that Rubble & Strafe, especially when it said "inspired by Amstrad classic 'Harrier Attack'" (a game I used to play often in the mid 80's) but the screenshots show that ugly resolution breaking rotation which puts me off completely... Shame.

Why is this thing called GMBlue: Player anyways? What's the blue about?

Ah ok. I noticed the EA versions had a blue YOYO icon rather than the green (though the current one still uses the green but with a blue circle on the bottom left) but I didn't realise it had actual signifance other than being able to quickly tell which one was which when both loaded at same time.